New Books About Africa

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I recently finished Melissa Fay Greene's excellent book about Africa, There Is No Me Without You. Which other new books can help me expand my understanding of Africa?

Ellen responds:
Greene is an American writer (you may have seen her work in Good Housekeeping) who ended up adopting two orphans she met while writing her book about the orphans created by the AIDS crisis in Africa. Hers is just one of many new books (fiction and nonfiction) that are revealing the continent to readers as never before.

Two new books that will help you visualize how African wars are affecting the lives of its young people are A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah, and What Is the What, by Dave Eggers. In A Long Way Gone, Beah, conscripted at age 13, tells the story of his journey from the fighting in Sierra Leone to the United States, where he arrived when he was 18. It's an amazing account. In What Is the What, award-winning novelist Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) fictionalizes a true story based on the experiences of a young man he befriended who was caught up in the Sudanese civil war and ended up as a refugee in America.

Similarly compelling is Hisham Matar's short novel, In the Country of Men, which deals with Libya under Qaddafi. A finalist for Britain's prestigious Man Booker literary prize, this is a story told from the point of view of a 9-year-old whose father belongs to the political opposition. The young boy is his mother's confidant, but he's at a loss trying to understand her grief and anger over being forced into marriage with a man she didn't love. This is a moving and psychologically complex novel about what happens to the family and to the mother's relationship with her husband when Qaddafi's thugs close in.

Here's another novel that qualifies as an epic about Africa: Measuring Time, by Helon Habila. It's the story of twin brothers raised in a Nigerian village. One runs away and becomes a mercenary soldier. The other, more sickly boy, remains behind and becomes a local historian. Habila artfully contrasts the life of the mind and the life of action, and how both can be swept up in violence.

Finally, a terrific new novel by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun, tells the story of Nigeria in the 1960s through a cast of characters that includes twin sisters, a radical professor, and an Englishman. As the colonial order is collapsing, tribal loyalties reemerge, and ideas that sounded good on paper are suddenly swept up in a maelstrom of violence.